1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to managing the content of a web site. More specifically, this disclosure relates to managing tags implemented for management of third party reporting services on a web site.
2. Background
A tag is generally a piece of data representative of other information. For example, referring to an advertisement on a web page, the link within an advertisement may be referred to as a tag or the data representative while the data, once the link is selected, is the other information represented by the tag. Tags represent a wide area of data and data types such as a web link, a media file or an image. A collection of data for a specific topic may be represented by a tag. When a tag on a web page is clicked, other content may appear. For example, a web page hosted on a web server that supports tagging may include the tags United States news, United Kingdom news, France news, politics, and law. Someone viewing that webpage can easily tell the web page relates to news and politics in several countries by viewing the tags. The tags are usually displayed as a listing on the web page where each tag that is displayed is a web link. Once the link is activated, all of the web pages that use the tag activated may be displayed. Thus, in the example above, a user can easily find all of the pages that relate to news in the United States.
Links on a web site may also have tags that are seemingly unrelated to the link. For example, if a user clicks to purchase ski equipment from a web site, an advertisement for ski vacations may be displayed. Similarly, links or advertisements of a retailer with a web site may be tagged so that once a user accesses the web site or certain products on the retailer's web site, pop up advertisements of other businesses offering related services may appear. Alternatively, search result listings may have tags associated with them. Tags can refer to any information that is or becomes associated with a search or search results. Tags may also be generated by search engine optimization tools or search engine optimization agencies. Tags may be attributed to a web page search. Traffic may be driven to a website in exchange for a share of the revenue. The host that is driving the traffic may have a tag on the web page. A tag can also store user preferences and other related information. Thus, tags can be used in countless ways within web sites.
Tags are becoming increasingly popular in website design. Tags have many purposes. One purpose is to manage traffic to and from a website. In general, web pages include at least one tag and as many as ten or more. A web page that includes advertising includes additional tags, including a set of tags for the content of the web page and additional tags related to the advertising on the web page. Advertisements may include tags of a specific content, specific to an advertisement campaign or specific to a domain. Tags may be used to track people or track traffic to the website. A tag may be based on a user's behavior so it may include personalization settings. As web sites become more and more complex, sometimes having hundreds or thousands of links within a single web site, the number of tags on the page also increases and the management of the tags becomes more and more complex.
Tags are provided to a web browser on a personal computer with the rest of the information on a web page requested by the browser. Once a web page is loaded on a web browser, every tag on the website must retrieve its URL successfully in order for the web page to complete loading. Thus, web pages are taking longer and longer to load. If the network connection isn't optimized, it can take even more time for a web page to load. Tags may store a number of preferences in a cookie on a local computing system. If the temporary internet folder of the computing system is not cleaned regularly, there may be tens of thousands of files to look through. Furthermore, the temporary folder may be searched for additional values about the user or the user's preferences. For each tag on the web page, these values are then sent to the resulting domain. Once each domain sends a confirmation back to the tag, the web page will be loaded. Often, web pages with multiple tags can take a lot of time to load properly. Additionally, if a user has certain internet security settings in place, the web page may not load at all because the security settings will detect the web page traffic as a cross domain call.
Unfortunately, managing tags and keeping track of all of a web site's tags is currently a manual process and can be extremely burdensome. In a typical environment, in order to implement a new tag, an email or other communication is sent to the developer or group of developers by the person or entity interested in adding the new tag. The email may include the requirements for the new tag. The developer or group of developers then proceeds with building the tag based on the requirements given in the email.
Popular commercial web content management systems include BroadVision, provided by BroadVision, Inc., Redwood City, Calif., and Vignette, offered by Vignette Corp., Austin, Tex. Popular open source web content management systems include Drupal, and Joomla, both distributed under the General Public License (GPL) and maintained by a community of users and developers. None of the current web content management systems currently has a standard facility for managing tags on a page, developers often hardcode tags into the templates of a website or into the content of a website. This leads to an additional problem of effectively keeping track of all of the tags and their sources. A given website may have several tags that are unsourced. Determining the source of the unsourced tags can be a website administrator's nightmare. A web developer or administrator cannot simply remove the tag without first determining the source and why the tag was placed on the site. That information may not be readily available.
Another issue with tagging relates to reporting. Several reports are usually generated. For example, the search engine optimizer may have a report, the web site may have a traffic report, the advertisement server may also generate a report and each network where an advertisement is running may also generate a report. These reports usually come in various formats. Furthermore, such reports typically include inconsistent data. For example, a traffic report may state a web site was called 50 times while the report for a web site where the tag is hosted may state the call was made 100 times.
Additionally, most advertisement networks are plagued with what is known as piggyback pixels. Thus, if a call is made to a domain, the domain may make a call to another domain and so on until a successful call is reported back. If any of these calls fails, the web page will fail. Therefore, a need exists for an efficient way to manage tags and report tag usage.